L∞-Discrepancy analysis of polynomial-time deterministic samplers emulating rapidly mixing chains

Abstract

Markov chain Monte Carlo (MCMC) is a standard technique to sample from a target distribution by simulating Markov chains. In an analogous fashion to MCMC, this paper proposes a deterministic sampling algorithm based on deterministic random walk, such as the rotor-router model (a.k.a. Propp machine). For the algorithm, we give an upper bound of the point-wise distance (i.e., infinity norm) between the "distributions" of a deterministic random walk and its corresponding Markov chain in terms of the mixing time of the Markov chain. As a result, for uniform sampling of #P-complete problems, such as 0-1 knapsack solutions, linear extensions, matchings, etc., for which rapidly mixing chains are known, our deterministic algorithm provides samples with a "distribution" with a point-wise distance at most ε from the target distribution, in time polynomial in the input size and ε-1. © 2014 Springer International Publishing Switzerland.